About MAME

Purpose

MAME's main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the
emulated machines. This is done both for educational purposes and for
preservation purposes, in order to prevent historical software from
disappearing forever once the hardware it runs on stops working. Of
course, in order to preserve the software and demonstrate that the
emulated behavior matches the original, you must also be able to
actually use the software. This is considered a nice side effect, and is
not MAME's primary focus.

It is not our intention to infringe on any copyrights or patents on the
original games. All of MAME's source code is either our own or freely
available. To operate, the emulator requires images of the original
ROMs, CDs, hard disks or other media from the machines, which must be
provided by the user. No portions of the original game code are included
in the executable.

Cost

MAME is free. Its source code is free. The project as whole is under
distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0),
but most of code (including core functionality) is available under the
BSD-3-clause license.

Software Image Files

ROM, CD, hard disk and other media images are all copyrighted material.
They cannot be distributed without the explicit permission of the
copyright holder(s). They are not "abandonware", nor has any of the
software supported by MAME passed out of copyright.

MAME is not intended to be used as a tool for mass copyright
infringement. Therefore, it is strongly against the authors' wishes to
sell, advertise, or link to resources that provide illegal copies of
ROM, CD, hard disk or other media images.

Derivative Works

Because the name MAME is trademarked, you must abide by the rules set
out for trademark usage if you wish to use "MAME" as part of the name
your derivative work. In general, this means you must request
permission, which requires that you follow the guidelines above.

The version number of any derivative work should reflect the version
number of the MAME release from which it was was derived.

Official Contact Information

For questions regarding the MAME license, trademark, or other usage, go to http://mamedev.org/.